A military lesson America must grasp

In the weeks before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, I made a call to a retired general who had served in the first Gulf war seeking information about General Tommy Franks, the head of US Central Command who would run the upcoming campaign.

The retired officer was still well connected with his former colleagues and I asked what the uniforms were saying about General Franks. "A lot of senior military in the Pentagon don't have a lot of confidence in him," he harrumphed. "If you look at Tora Bora and Anaconda, you have the same leaders making the decisions now [who] did in that debacle."

The comment surprised me. Tora Bora, the mountain complex in eastern Afghanistan that served as a redoubt for Al Qaida fighters, was emerging in the public mind as the battle where US forces, overly relying on their Afghan allies, let hundreds of Al Qaida operators slip away, perhaps including Osama Bin Laden himself. But Operation Anaconda, a large-scale battle in the nearby Shahikot Valley, three months later, was supposed to be just the opposite: a successful engagement in which US troops killed hundreds of enemy fighters.

Sean Naylor's impeccably reported new book on the battle, Not a Good Day to Die, will lie to rest any residual belief that Anaconda was anything but a horribly planned mess of an operation in which commanders sent US troops into a battle they had not been prepared for, against enemies they did not know existed, without the weapons they needed. In the end, eight Americans would die and hundreds of Al Qaida operators, some of them senior leaders, would escape into Pakistan.

Naylor, a reporter for the Army Times who was embedded with US troops during Anaconda, has produced a gem in the mould of Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden's account of an ill-fated US operation in Somalia. But, at a time when the Pentagon is in the midst of one of its most important rethinks of military policy in a generation the congressionally-mandated Quadrennial Defence Review, due to be issued in a matter of months the book should be required reading for another, more important reason.

Naylor's account is a cautionary tale for those, including Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, who believe that advanced weapons technologies can transform the US military into a smaller, lighter force using futuristic reconnaissance and communications equipment in place of heavy guns and boots on the ground.

If Naylor's book illustrates one thing, it is that no amount of intelligence, satellite imagery and precision air strikes can take the place of a well-armed artillery unit when a battle begins to go wrong. It is a lesson that the Pentagon is still struggling to grasp in Iraq.

The chain of events that led to the failures in Anaconda started well before the battle was even conceived when Rumsfeld ordered what Naylor calls a "force cap" in Afghanistan, keeping the number of conventional troops in the country low. The rationale was that the army could, through modern technology, do more with less, a central tenet of Rumsfeld's transformational agenda.

The result was that battalions of the 101st Airborne, the first conventional army forces used in Afghanistan, were sent into Anaconda with almost no artillery equipment that would have come in handy when it turned out that hundreds of Al Qaida fighters, most of whom had not shown up on satellite imagery and spy plane reconnaissance, were waiting in the Shahikot with plenty of artillery of their own.

Under the doctrine advanced by Rumsfeld, precision bombing from aircraft can make up for a lack of artillery. But soldiers found it difficult, sometimes impossible, to find available fighters and bombers.

Senior US commanders also displayed a disturbing over-reliance on intelligence gathered by satellites and spy planes another favourite of Rumsfeld's.

In almost every respect, the doctrines and technologies pushed by Rumsfeld's transformationalists let down the men who fought in Anaconda. Communications gear failed, electronic intelligence misled planners, air support took hours to arrive, lightly armed men could not defend themselves. As Pentagon planners push on with Rumsfeld's revolution, they would do well to take to heart the lessons of an actual war.

- Financial Times